Che Libracp 
of the 


Ciniversity of Worth Carolina 


Collection of orth Caroliniana 


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New York 
| January 9, 10 and 11, 1917 


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RURAL FIELDS 161 


the policy of establishing pastors in the country in those few 
fields which in any given year are ready for a pastor. We 
recommend that the salary of these men, to be paid in part 
by the Boards of Missions, shall be such as the community 
may be able in time itself to pay, except in poverty stricken 
or retarded regions. 


2. We recommend that Boards of Church Erection con- 
cern themselves definitely with providing manses and par- 
sonages for pastors who shall live in the country and that 
this policy be coordinated with the policy of the Boards of 
Missions in the establishment of country pastorates. 


3. We recommend that the work of these country pas- 
tors be promoted by a union of national and local initiative. 
The local conference or association, classis or presbytery 
should commit its powers of supervision to the national 
Board, in order that the whole denomination may be united 
in promoting the selected churches in the country which in 
any given year should be set forward and established as 
pastorates and parishes. The fields thus selected should be 
visited by the national Secretary with sufficient frequency. 
Men of high character should be found for these fields and 


everything done to secure an established pastorate. 


4. We recommend that these country pastorates be for 
not less than five years and that the church be encouraged 
to keep a pastor for at least ten years in the country. This 
is for the purpose of promoting definite work and work that 
will have a future. 


5. The Committee on Rural Fields is instructed for the 
coming year to correspond with colleges and schools in vari- 
ous parts of the country with a view to an increased pro- 
vision for graduate education and short course education 
for country pastors. 


6. We recommend that Mr. Paul L. Vogt be added to 
the Rural Fields Committee, to fill the vacancy caused by 
the death of Rev. Ward Platt, D. D. 


7. We recommend for the coming year that the appro- 
priation of not more than $500. to the Rural Fields Com- 
mittee be continued. 


162 HOME MISSIONS COUNCIL 


FIELD STUDY OF NEGRO CONDITIONS 


Pending the consideration of the report, a paper by Pro- 
fessor E. C. Branson of the University of North Carolina, 
regarding a field study of negro conditions in Orange 
County, North Carolina, was read by Mr. H. N. Morse as 


follows: 


This study of Negro Churches and Sunday Schools in 
Orange County, North Carolina, was made by Rev. Walter 
Patten, who since 1914 has been pastor of the Methodist 
Episcopal Church South, at Chapel Hill, the seat of the 
University of North Carolina. During his pastorate here 
he has been pursuing courses in philosophy, economics, and 
rural economics and sociology offered by the University, and 
in June, 1916, won his Master’s degree. 


The field study assigned him in his rural sociology course 
was the Negro Churches and Sunday Schools of Orange 
County: (1) because our University courses in Country- 
Life Conditions and Problems are always based on direct 
field studies, (2) because church and Sunday school prob- 
lems were personally appealing to him as a minister, (3) _be- 
cause he is a member of the Sunday School Board of his Con- 
ference, and a capital student of Sunday school problems 
in general, (4) because the Negro Sunday School in the 
South is, as he says, a mired wheel, (5) because in Orange 
the Negroes are thinly scattered among a larger white pop- 
ulation and thus present one of the two distinct race prob- 
lems of the South, and (6) because we hoped to stir the 
spiritual conscience of North Carolina in behalf of a back- 
ward race that sits in darkness and in the.shadow of death 
—our brothers in black among whom we live and move and 
have our being daily. 


These field studies are based upon the questionnaire pre- 
pared by the North Carolina Club at the University in co- 
operation with the Office of Markets and Rural Organiza- 
tion of the Federal Department of Agriculture, and used by 
club members in a similar study of the White Churches and 
Sunday Schools of the County in 1915-16. 


NEGRO CHURCHES 163 


During the year devoted by Mr. Patten to his particular 
field study, he visited and photographed the Negro Church 
buildings of the county. He got into communication with 
the ministers serving the 27 Negro Churches of Orange; 
with the Sunday school superintendents, teachers, church 
officers, and leaders. He spent many hours in conference 
with the Negroes in their churches, schools, and homes. His 
field experiences establish certain facts and lead into various 
conclusions. Among many, these: 


1. The astonishing gains made by the Negroes of the 
county in conquering the conditions of material well-being, 
as property owners and tax payers. Nearly nine-tenths of 
the Negro dwellings of the county are oecupied by owners, 
and in general their homes are well furnished, neat and clean 
within—less so without. Their homes are being screened 
against flies and mosquitoes, while back-yards and outhouses 
are beginning to challenge attention in a hopeful way. In 
these particulars, the town Negroes make a better showing 
than the country Negroes. 


2. The direct result of such economic conditions is di- 
rectly reflected by the small amount of petty offenses against 
law and order, and by the even smaller ratio of felonies com- 
mitted by Negroes in Orange. In 165. years only one rape 
has been committed by a Negro of the county and only four 
Negroes have ever been hanged in Orange. Pilfering is cer- 
tainly at a minimum among the Negroes of the county, while 
forgeries and similar attacks upon property are unknown. 
On the whole, they are a law-abiding, self-respecting element 
of population; industrious, self-sustaining, reliable, polite, 
and accommodating in rare measure. Chronic indigence is 
almost unknown among them. 


The level of race pride in general is so high among the 
Negroes of Orange that a sturdy exercise of public opinion 
under the leadership of our Negro preachers would quickly 
put an end to the one offense that is most common among 
Negroes, and that most of all brings the good name of Negro 
citizenship into disrepute in the county, I speak of the il- 
legal peddling of liquors. The blind tigers and boot-leggers 
are commonly Negroes, and just as commonly they are the 


164 HOME MISSIONS COUNCIL 


convenient tools of white people, who tempt them with be- 
wildering rewards and desert them when the law lays a heavy 
hand on them. Here is a social problem that should appeal 
to our Negro preachers who are eminently effective in rais- 
ing the standards of race pride. As usual the law of public 
opinion among both races is the matter of critical im- 
portance. 


3. The Negro preachers are preferred leaders—not in 
religious concerns solely, but in the whole round of Negro 
activities and interests in every community. Their churches 
are social as well as religious centers. In the county-wide 
campaign in 1915 for better sanitary conditions, we found 
that the best approach—indeed the only approach—to the 
Negroes was through their preachers and churches. Lan- 
tern slides and lectures exhibiting the menace of unsanitary 
privies seemed to many people out of place in the white 
churches, but without exception public health seemed to the 
Negroes to be a perfectly proper church concern. 


The Negro preacher is usually an adviser in the details 
of property transfers, and a leader in all efforts for better 
school conditions. Commonly he is custodian of society and 
lodge collections as well as church funds. He is more than 
apt to be a property owner and man of common affairs; to 
live among his people and to lead them in the matters of or- 
dinary daily life. Only three of our white preachers live 
among their country parishioners, but nine of the country 
Negro preachers are settled down among their people as 
shepherds of their flocks, and all of them own their homes 
and farms. Only one of the resident white country preachers 
is a householder. 


4. Our Negro preachers like the race they serve have 
ceased to be concerned about politics—so, almost without 
exception. For many years after the War the organizing, 
constructive genius of the race was absorbed by the concerns 
of civic freedom and party politics, and Negro preachers, 
whatever else they might be, were political leaders. 


It is so no longer. Our Orange county Negroes are busy 
with the details of daily toil, with bread-winning industries 
that show remarkable variety, with the acquisition of 


NEGRO CHURCHES 165 


homes and farms, household goods, domestic animals, farm 
tools and equipments, better schools, and larger bank ac- 
counts. In dumb, blind fashion, they realize at last that 
home and farm ownership means economic freedom, and 
that without economic freedom, civic democracy is but a 
name full of sound and fury signifying nothing. At all events 
our Negroes have a larger faith in bank books than in spell- 
ing books and ballot.boxes. They are beginning at the be- 
ginning of all real racial development. ‘The final end may 
be far ahead, but with a start of this sort the movement 
forward and upward is informed with the conquering forces 
of imperious necessity. Civilizing a landless, homeless peo- 
ple is a futile endeavor everywhere and always. 


5. Societies in Negro country church communities in 
Orange are rare, and even in our small towns they are few 
when compared with the various and numerous organizations 
of all sorts in City Negro Churches. The societies we find 
in the Negro churches in Hillsboro, Chapel Hill, and Carr- 
boro are mainly church aid societies of one sort or another, 
charged with mission collections, care of church buildings 
or parsonages and so forth. The social organizations are 
very few, because the congregations are mainly rural, and 
even the village churches exist under rural conditions. Sick 
Benefit Societies, Burial Benefit Orders, fraternal lodges 
and the like are fewer than a half-dozen among the Negroes 
of the whole county. 


6. The place of the Church in the Negro’s consciousness 
is large. Under fervent and fervid leadership he is deeply 
impressed with the importance of church membership. He 
does not question its being the doorway to Heaven; without 
it he feels that he is on the broad highway to Hell.» And 
here is one of the reasons why Negro congregations support 
their churches with a generosity that is amazing. For in- 
stance, the salary of Negro preachers in Orange in 1914 
averaged $2.05 per church member. The salaries received 
by the white preachers of the county represented exactly the 
same average per member. The per capita burden borne for 
buildings and expenses was 88 cents by the Negroes against 
$1.04 by the whites. Where the Negroes lagged was in the 
support of missions, their per capita contribution being 13 


166 HOME MISSIONS COUNCIL _~ | 


cents against 91 cents for the whites. All told, the burden 
laid by religion on church members in the county in 1914 was 
$3.04 per Negro church member and $4.00 for the whites. 
The meagre wealth of the Negro considered, we may well say 
that the figures are amazing. 


Another reason for the generous church contribution of 
the Negroes lies in their manner of taking up collections. 
Raising a collection is a formal interval and impressive epi- 
sode in every service. ‘The deacons and stewards take their 
stand in front of the pulpit and while the congregation sings 
song after song the contributors rise, come forward, and de- 
posit their gifts compassed about by a cloud of admiring 
witnesses. The church treasurer is expected to keep an ac- 
curate record of each contribution and to render a public 
report of totals by names at the end of the year. The cere- 
mony is appealing, persuasive, compelling. A time or two 
we have ourselves passed through this experience, and it left 
no money of any sort in our pockets. The Negroes show 
positive genius in this matter. 


7. The religion of the Negro is highly imaginative and 
emotional. How could it be otherwise? A common com- 
ment is that it is strongly mystic and feebly ethic, but when 
we consider how much of our own religion is contemplative 
and how little of it is active and actual, we are not inclined 
to press this comment into criticism of Negro spirituality. 
We know so many instances of unobtrusive but sturdy right- 
living among our Negroes, so many hard-working, right- 
minded, honest and reliable Negroes, so much of the right- 
eousness that exalts a community, that we are increasingly 


grateful and less and less critical of our colored friends and 
neighbors. 


8. And finally it is evident that we are still far from 
knowing the things that seethe in the soul of the Negro deep 
down below the surface—largely the things about which he 
is himself inarticulate and dumb. In the South we think we 
know the Negro, and superficially—very superficially—we 
do; but as a matter of fact the self-protective hiding instinct 
of jungle days lingers on as a distinct racial element of 
Negro character, and the real Negro is cunningly with- 
drawn from sight, quite instinctively and unconsciously. The 


NEGRO CHURCHES 167 


Negro knows the Southern White man far better than the 
Southern White man knows the Negro. He infallibly senses 
the worst in the best of us. He knows unerringly our 
weaknesses, defects, and deficiencies of disposition and char- 
acter. In the days before the war young mistis never argued 
with Black Mammie when she said of the dashing young 
beau, “Honey, I done tuck de measure uh his foot. He ain 
gwine do. He ain no quality folks like us.” Verdicts on all 
intimate family matters were sure to be rendered by the 
house servants—adroitly and inoffensively always; and they 
were accepted as final, not always without reluctance but 
always without debate. 


The negro is a superb judge of character—not of the 
best but of the worst things in character. It is another 
survival of primitive traits. It renders him acutely aware 
of the worst in the best of us and equally blind to the best 
in the worst of us. Largely because of this primal instinct 
he leads a life of racial aloofness, from which he emerges 
only when he is in trouble—say, when the sheriff seizes his 
property for taxes or his person for offenses against the 
law. When in need he calls on his white friends for endorse- 
ments, gifts, loans, food, fuel, old clothes, donations for 
church and school buildings and the like. But in ordinary 
times and seasons he withdraws into himself, goes his own 
way, and lives his own life. 


It is a state of affairs in the South that hardly challenges 
consciousness and rarely occasions comment. But more and 
more the races draw apart. Each pursues the even tenor 
of its way with increasing unconcern about the other. The 
Negro establishes an autonomous church life of his own. 
The white churches feel less and less responsibility for his 
spiritual well-being. And thus it becomes far easier for us 
to have an incredible tenderness for Blacks a thousand miles 
away than to love the wood-chopper in our back yards—as 
Emerson once reminded a Boston audience. 


The only points of racial contact in the South lie in the 
world of economic dependencies, and—as we are beginning 
somewhat to realize—in the social nexus that makes health 
or disease an inescapable common estate. 


168 HOME MISSIONS COUNCIL 


We suffer from a wide-spread lack of sympathetic under- 
standing of the Negro. Whether or not the Negro can work 
out his own salvation without our help is not the main mat- 
ter for us to consider. Whether or not we can work out our 
own salvation, if we do not help this backward race to the 


best of our ability, is a matter of grave doubt in my own 
mind. 


We are and ought to be in peril if we dare to leave out 
of our scheme of ethics or religion any creature of God’s, 
black or white, dumb or human, who can in anywise be bet- 
tered by our help. 


Tinie 
00030755549 E 


FOR USE ONLY IN 


THE NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION 


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